A variety of different types of records may be stored in an electronic format so as to facilitate the identification, retrieval and sharing of the records while correspondingly reducing the need for physical records. One type of record that is being increasingly stored in an electronic format is a patient record. A patient record may be maintained by a healthcare facility and may include information regarding a patient, such as various demographic attributes of the patient, e.g., name, address, date of birth, etc., and encounters of the patient with the healthcare facility. A patient record may also include or be associated with other information, such as one or more documents related to the patient's healthcare including, for example, the physician's notes, lab results and/or images of the patient, e.g., x-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, computer aided tomography (CAT) scans, etc.
Some patients may visit multiple healthcare facilities over the course of time. These healthcare facilities may be owned and operated by different healthcare organizations. Each healthcare facility may maintain a patient record, but the patient records maintained by the different healthcare facilities may be independent of one another since the different healthcare organizations that own and operate the healthcare facilities may not share patient records or otherwise cooperate to maintain a common patient record.
In order to have a more complete and comprehensive understanding of a patient's health, a physician or other healthcare practitioner may wish to have access to all of the patient records, regardless of the healthcare facility that created and maintains the patient records. However, in an instance in which a patient has visited multiple healthcare facilities that are owned or operated by different healthcare organizations and unless the patient has collected and provides a physician or other healthcare practitioner with all of their patient records from the various healthcare facilities that they have visited, the physician or other healthcare practitioner may have difficulty accessing or be unable to access the plurality of patient records maintained for the patient by the various healthcare facilities. This difficulty may be exacerbated by the assignment of a different, unique patient identifier to the patient by at least some of the healthcare facilities since a healthcare practitioner may be unaware of the patient identifier associated with the patient by other healthcare facilities and, as such, may have difficulty identifying the patient to the other healthcare facilities.
As such, a healthcare practitioner may find it difficult to readily access all of the patient records created and stored by the various healthcare facilities that have treated the patient in the past. Thus, a healthcare practitioner may not have the benefit of the information contained in at least some of the patient records maintained by other healthcare facilities, thereby potentially reducing the efficiency with which the healthcare practitioner may treat a patient.